Scientists believe we may remain conscious during our own death

Is there life after death? Although no one has really been able to give a definite answer about this, it seems that our bodies continue to be somewhat active after we die. Leaving us trapped inside our own bodies.

A state of consciousness that continues after death

A study at the School of Medicine at the Stony Brook University in New York has recently changed how we think about death. Until now, we all used to think that our body stops working when our heart stops beating, but recent tests carried out on rats may have proved the opposite.

During these tests, an increase in brain waves in the period after the heart stops was recorded by researchers, who also discovered that some brain cells took several hours to die. This electric activity could be due to calcium which fills brain cells after death and causes a physiological phenomenon which could explain why some people 'see the light at the end of the tunnel' or have out of body experiences in situations where their heart stops. White lights, feeling quite calm, accelerated thoughts. All of these sensations could be due to a certain ‘consciousness’ that could continue after the brain really dies.

Some can even hear doctors pronouncing them dead

Anecdotal evidence already exists where people going through a cardiac arrest report hearing everything going on around them. Dr Sam Parnia from the Stony Brook University School of Medicine revealed to Live Science:

They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working, they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them.

Even scarier than this, many who have been resuscitated recall hearing doctors pronouncing them dead.

Dr Parnia revealed that we are pronounced dead when our heart stops and 'at the same time, our brain function halts 'almost immediately'. He also reports that the 'thinking' part of the brain, the cerebral cortex also slows down, however, our actual brain cells can still remain active for hours after the heart has stopped. He added:

If you manage to restart the heart, which is what CPR attempts to do, you’ll gradually start to get the brain functioning again. The longer you’re doing CPR, those brain cell death pathways are still happening — they’re just happening at a slightly slower rate.

So, after we die, it is possible that our brain functions start to get slower and slower, perhaps making us realize that we are no longer a part of this world…